Re: [Second City: Cat & Jack]
She watched as Jack watched. Oh, Cat had her own opinions about the wares sold and traded in this place. She wasn't nearly as conservative as older her was, despite Reece's insistence that they were entirely the same person. No, young and perched atop the stand, as if she was made for balancing atop buildings, Cat understood this world. She understood the black-market, and she understood that there were things for sale that the normal world wouldn't appreciate. This place was dirty, but it was magic, and it was unspeakable things, and Cat had no problem with either. Call it grayness, but children were sold in the overground world, and why not here? There was nothing here that didn't have its dreadful measure in the light, and so she watched.
Jack pushed himself away and tried to peer past fabric, and Cat chuckled. It was a young sound, one that came from right over his head, and she peered down at him, wondering if he would look up.
If he did look up, she met his gaze with her own, mossy one. She smiled.
Inside the stall, a very dark child stood. He had no shoes, and he barely reached the woman's knee, and the shopkeeper was counting bills as the tear-stained woman handed them into his palm. Someone else might find it reprehensible, this particular sale, but Cat had been this child. She had survived this world, and the child would too. The alternative was not surviving, and children born and raised in these places? They knew how to survive.
She flipped past Jack again. More obvious this time, and all youthful sway as she moved past the crowd and weaved around people in the most deliberate of ways. Her movements were don't catch me and they were follow me, and Cat did adore her contradiction. His wallet was in her pocket now, but there was cash between her fingers. His cash, and she handed it to a vendor at a stand selling love in a bottle, and she nodded toward Jack, wherever he was in the crowd, and told the man to deliver there bottle there, to that man. She also told the man to direct the recipient of the gift to the food area, and that was where the kitten went.
The tents here were against stone walls and crowded. The smells were exotic, foreign. Cumin clung to the nose, curry tickled the palate, sauerkraut made eyes water. It was a loud and messy place, and people sat on rugs and on dirt. There were no tables, but only pillows and blankets and rugs, but everyone crowded together with bowls in their hands. The food here was messy, and the bowls were cracked and old and mismatched, and Cat sat herself in the center, legs crossed and with the mien of boredom that so often accompanied the young. She'd acquired a head scarf between here and there, black and with clinking medallions like bells tied to the corners of the fabric. But, and even with her dark hair covered, her mossy eyes were unique, and she waited.